Importing geometry into UE4

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In this movie Scott explains how to properly import the geometry we have exported from either Maya or CINEMA 4D into Unreal Editor. The Unreal Editor FBX import window has quite a few options and settings and Scott will walk through the ones we need to understand to import our geometry into our project.

- [Voiceover] So now we have our project all set upwith our folders and our settings,and now it's time to import our geometry.So I'm gonna go over to our geo folder.Again, we're gonna make folders for the different elementsbecause we have a few different objects that get importedwith everything and just to keep everything nice and clean.This is the way I like to do it.I highly recommend it.Okay, so first we're gonna import our bottle.So let's make a bottle folder.Open that up, import.Go to chapter three,Maya, FBX, export bottle.

Okay, let's look at our options here.We want to import a skeletal,and we want to import the mesh.Again, this doesn't have a technical skeleton.But anything that's animated that has to be on.Let's open up our advanced tab here.This is all good.Preserve smoothing groups, import meshes in bones, are on.Everything else is turned off.Creates physics asset can get turned off.We don't want Unreal to compute normals,we've set up our normals properly,so import normals and tangents.We want our animations of course,so we want to click on that, and we want touncheck import materials and textures,because we're gonna set those up manually here in Unreal.

Cool, so let's import.All right, again we have this, could not findthe bind pose error, it's not really an errorfor our purposes.You can disregard it and close this window.And we're gonna open up bottle_01 anim,and just take a look, and we can see,we have our little bottle spinning.And in our skeleton tree, you can see we haveour same hierarchy as we had set upin our content creation application.Everything's cool, it's coming in fine.All right, next, let's import the panel.So I'll go, make a folder called panels.

Go to import panels_lower.All of our options here.Everything should be set the same as we just did.Awesome, great, let's import it.Same little error, say go away, all good.Let's open up the panels_lower anim.And then we can see, we have our panels, awesome.All that animation, all that stuff bakedinto that one object.And over on our skeleton tree here,you can see we have a lot more objects on this one,because there are different meshes, and different knoles,and all these things that were put togetherwhen the asset was built, to be able to dothe animation and organization properly.

And that all comes in clean, as our skeleton.Everything looks good here, great.Okay, so we'll go back to our geometry folder.We're gonna make a new folder,we're gonna call this panel_cage.It's that little extra element that goes around the panels.We go to import, go to panel_cage_lower,And you can see, this one, we brought it in,and it import as skeletal isn't automatically checked now.I believe that sometimes the importercan't see that it's an animated element for some reason.So it doesn't automatically offer that option.We know it's animated, so we want toturn that on automatically.

We can override what it thinks.Same settings, everything else as before.Make sure import animations is on.Click import.Again, close this error.We're gonna open up the panel_cage_lower anim.Just make sure, and there we go.We can see that the animation is in there.For some reason the importer doesn't always see it.No worries, we just tell it it's there, and it finds it.Okay, so now we are going to import the tube.So let's make a new folder, call this tube.

Import tube.Again, same thing, we need to manually turn onimport as skeletal.Everything else we leave as we have been doing.Import it.Disregard that, open up this, just to double check.We should just see a little vertical movementhappen a little way into the sequence.Boom, done, awesome.Easy animations there.Okay, so now, let's import the rings.So, that time, everything else looks good.Import normals and tangents is on.

Animations is on, excellent, import it in.All right, you could see that it took a few minutesto sort of just get up and going,because there's a little bit more going oninside that file, in terms of the amountof geometry and animation, no worries.Brought it all in, disregard this error,let's open up the rings_01_anim clip.And we can see that we have all of our rings in there.It's a little smaller here, but we can seethat everything's moving around.If we look at our skeleton tree, we can seethat we have all these objects in here.And that's exactly how we had it set up.All the names are all right, everything's looking good.Cool.

All right, so we just have one last thing to import,which is our platform.So we'll make a folder for our platform.Open up that folder, import platform.Skeletals on, meshes on, these guys are on.Normals and tangents are on.Animations is on.Cool, import.Cool, turn this off.Open up this, just to see our little spinning platform.Cool, everything's good, we look over here.We can see all our different objects in the platform.Everything's working great.Okay, so now we've imported our six different piecesof animated geometry.

Made different folders for all of them.We've checked them out in personato see everything working.Next up, we're gonna actually bring these objectsinto our viewport and start assembling our scene.

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Released

4/25/2016

Unreal bridges the gap between 3D motion graphics and the processing power of real-time game engines. You can create content in familiar tools (CINEMA 4D and Maya) and use Unreal to animate and render those assets. This workflow allows for the creation of gorgeous imagery while bypassing the traditional time-consuming rendering process of traditional 3D tools.

This course offers mograph designers a quick-start guide to real-time motion graphics in Unreal Engine 4 (UE4). Scott Pagano shows how to prep and import both static and animated geometry and animate objects and cameras with the Matinee Editor. He shows how to flesh out your scenes with Unreal's lighting and shading tools, and export video files and image sequences for further refinement in software such as After Effects. Following the quick-start chapter are three real-world projects that demonstrate the power of the workflow.

This forward-thinking approach to motion graphics leaves antiquated processes behind and presents modern, efficient, and fun ways to create 3D imagery. Once you have a grasp of how to import, animate, and make your content look great in UE4, the doors are open to dive into worlds of virtual reality, gaming, and interactive content. Check out more of our Unreal training here.